Event Horizon: A Study Set

November 18, 2009

Institution

Walker Art Center

About This Set

This set is a resource for teachers, tour guides, and visitors to enrich their experiences in the exhibition Event Horizon. Just as one encounters the exhibition by traversing through three galleries, entering the occassional secluded room, and spending time with monitors and headphones, this presentation has dividers to signify these thresholds. In addition to a glimpse at the show's visual aspects, this presentation offers information about several artists, artworks, meanings, and interpretations that can be encountered during one's visit. Many of the artworks are contextualized and illuminated by supplemental resources that have been integrated into the presentation.

Tips: How to Navigate the Presentation

Hover your mouse over an artwork's image to engage the zoom tool, a +/- slider and thumbnail that allow you to magnify any detail of the image.

Click the "More Info" button located at the very bottom of most slides. This will open up the Work of Art Detail page. Scroll down and use the blue tabs to investigate the scale of the work or read how other ArtsConnectEd users have tagged or commented on the art work.

Christian Marclay's From Hand to Ear (1994) makes a reference to From Hand to Mouth (1967) by Bruce Nauman. Notice the parallels that exist between the similar titles, the medium/techniques (wax and casting), and the artists' approaches to self-portraiture.

"The more you look at the same exact thing, the more the meaning goes away and the better and emptier you feel."--Andy Warhol, 1975
For Warhol and fellow Pop artists, reproducing images from popular culture was the visual means for expressing detachment from emotions, an attitude they regarded as characteristic of the 1960s. Like droning newscasts, repetition dissipates meaning and with it the capacity of images to move or disturb. Warhol created 16 Jackies in response to the November 1963 assassination of President John F. Kennedy, an event whose mass-media coverage reached an unparalleled number of people.
The four images of Jacqueline Kennedy, each repeated four times, were enlargements of news photographs that appeared widely and continually in the media after the assassination. Taken from issues of Life magazine, the images depict, from top to bottom: Jackie stepping off the plane upon arrival at Love Field in Dallas; stunned at the swearing-in ceremony for Lyndon B. Johnson aboard Air Force One after the president's death; grieving at the Capitol; and smiling in the limousine before the assassination. 16 Jackies combines a number of themes important in Warhol's work, such as his fascination with American icons and celebrities, his interest in the mass media and the dissemination of imagery, and his preoccupation with death.

Andy Warhol, 16 Jackies (1964)

Walker Art Center

Although Warhol was already impressed with the glamour of Jackie Kennedy by 1962,1 he was unmoved by the news of John Kennedy's assassination the following year. He later recalled:
I heard the news over the radio when I was alone painting in my studio. I don't think I missed a stroke. I wanted to know what was going on out there, but that was the extent of my reaction.... Henry Geldzahler wanted to know why I wasn't more upset, so I told him about the time I was walking in India and saw a bunch of people in a clearing having a ball because somebody they really liked had just died and how I realized then that everything was just how you decided to think about it. I'd been thrilled having Kennedy as president; he was handsome, young, smart--but it didn't bother me that much that he was dead. What bothered me was the way the television and radio were programming everybody to feel so sad. It seemed like no matter how hard you tried, you couldn't get away from the thing.... John Quinn, the playwright ... was moaning over and over, "But Jackie was the most glamorous First Lady we'll every get."2
For Warhol, the visual means for expressing detachment from emotions, an attitude he regarded as characteristic of the 1960s in general,3 was through the replication of images. Like the droning repetition of newscasts, the device dissipates meaning, and with it the capacity of images to move or disturb: "The more you look at the same exact thing, the more the meaning goes away and the better and emptier you feel."4
The sixteen faces of Jackie Kennedy in Warhol's painting were blown up from four news photos that appeared ubiquitously in the media after the assassination. From top to bottom, the images are of Jackie smiling at Love Field on arrival in Dallas; stunned at the swearing-in ceremony for L.B.J. on Air Force One after the president's death; grieving at the Capitol; and in the limousine before the shooting. The top three appeared in the 24 November and 6 December 1963 issues of Life magazine: the first by an unidentified photographer; the second and third by Cecil Stoughton and Fred Ward, respectively; the source for the bottom one has not been identified, although a U.P.I. photograph similar to it was reproduced in Newsweek. Eventually, in Warhol's view, these images became so familiar that neutral identification is all that the viewer experiences.
Warhol make this point by repeating each of the four image of Jackie four times, in a simple well-designed non-sequential alternation of strips of "before and after" pictures. The high-contrast, low-information pictures, each as different from the others as one reproduction from another, are cropped to focus on Jackie's face, rhythmically directed one way along one row and then the other along the next. A deliberately careless look gives the painting a sense of chance and hurry, suggesting the quick duplication and dissemination of images.5 Additionally, expressivity is, in a sense, absent from the images themselves. Public expectation forces the face of the politician's wife into a perpetual, meaningless smile, while shock renders the widow as inexpressive and numb as one of Warhol's somnambulant superstars. The two faces, perceived by Warhol as equally unreal, have been further sapped of meaning by the mythologizing American culture and the techniques of reproduction, and are finally emptied of meaning by the artist's stylization.
1 See Andy Warhol and Pat Hackett, PoPism: The Warhol '60s (New York and London: Harcourt Brace Jovanovich, 1980), p. 36.
2 Ibid., p. 60.
3 Andy Warhol, The Philosophy of Andy Warhol (New York and London: Harcourt Brace Jovanovich, 1975), p. 27.
4 Warhol, PoPism, p. 50. It is interesting to note that 16 Jackies ignited the passion of a vandal who inscribed the words "HOGWASH/USA" on the panel third from the top on the leftmost column and "BLACK" on the panel second from the top on the rightmost column in ballpoint pen in November 1967; the inscriptions were successfully removed by Daniel Goldreyer in New York by late January 1968.
5 Warhol describes the silkscreening process he used, which allowed him to turn the work of reproducing the design over to Gerard Malanga and other assistants: "You pick a photograph, blow it up, transfer it in glue onto silk, and then roll ink across it so the ink goes through the silk but not through the glue. That way you get the same image, slightly different each time. It was all so simple-quick and chancy;" Warhol, PoPism, p. 22.

Andy Warhol, 16 Jackies (1964)

Walker Art Center

"I'd been thrilled having Kennedy as president; he was handsome, young, smart--but it didn't bother me that much that he was dead. What bothered me was the way the television and radio were programming everybody to feel so sad."--Andy Warhol
After President John F. Kennedy was assassinated in 1963, Andy Warhol began his series of "Jackie paintings" in response to the media blitz that followed the incident. 16 Jackies is a grid of four different images based on news photos of Jacqueline Kennedy from international press coverage of JFK's death.
As in Brillo Boxes (1964/1969, also on view here), the artist elevates commercial iconography to the status of fine art. In so doing, Warhol allows his viewer to consider the overlap of things that American culture values: wealth and success, human emotion, and artistic expression.

Andy Warhol, 16 Jackies (1964)

Walker Art Center

Jackie Kennedy has this place in the culture that is very confusing and very interesting that all came out of that day, that funeral, where the images that Warhol selected from came from. It was more than a marker in this country and, in a funny sort of way, through her choice of ritual to allow the country to begin to move ahead after what was an unbelievably traumatic event, I think people just never forgot and could never thank her enough for . . . At a moment of really incredible difficulty in this country, learning to mourn, she actually was able to shape a mourning ritual that allowed everyone to participate on some level. I don't know that the life she went on to live was of any great significance to anyone other than her and her family and that's as it should be. She became a private citizen. But, I think that moment is a very, very big moment and kind of Whitmanesque in a funny sort of way. It's a deep kind of poetry that resonates around that time and those images of her. What she pulled together at that time is very much a collage from a variety of different possible scenarios and she made it history. In America, where ritual tends to be a very awkward thing, that she created something that really was a classic was amazing.

Any incentive to paint is as good as any other. There is no poor subject. Painting is always strongest when in spite of composition, color, etc., it appears as a fact, or an inevitability, as opposed to a souvenir or arrangement. Painting relates to both art and life. Neither can be made . . . A pair of socks is no less suitable to make a painting with than wood, nails, turpentine, oil, and fabric. --Robert Rauschenberg, 1959
In the early 1950s, Robert Rauschenberg devised a radical new form, blending two- dimensional collage techniques with three-dimensional objects on painted surfaces. Definable neither as sculpture nor painting, these works were dubbed "combines" by the artist to describe their interdisciplinary formal roots. Rauschenberg's combination of found imagery and gestural brushwork places these works between two movements in painting: Abstract Expressionism and Pop Art.
Trophy II (for Teeny and Marcel Duchamp) is one of a series of five combines, all called "trophies," which alluded to the unconventional creative spirit of artists whose work Rauschenberg greatly admired: in this case, Marcel Duchamp and his wife, Teeny. Using found objects, photographs, and paint, the artist considered himself "a collaborator with objects." In this way, he sought to avoid excessive autobiographical readings and instead refers to the dynamics of the urban landscape.
Walker solo exhibition: Robert Rauschenberg: Painting, 1965

Robert Rauschenberg, Trophy II (for Teeny and Marcel Duchamp) (1960)

Walker Art Center

"I find [Marcel Duchamp's] life and work a constant inspiration. . . . His Bicycle Wheel has always struck me as one of the most beautiful pieces of sculpture I've ever seen."--Robert Rauschenberg
In the early 1950s, Robert Rauschenberg devised a radical new form, blending two-dimensional collage techniques with three-dimensional objects on painted surfaces. Definable neither as sculpture nor painting, these works were dubbed "combines" by the artist to describe their interdisciplinary formal roots.
Trophy II is one of a series of five combines, all called "trophies," which alluded to the unconventional creative spirit of artists whose work Rauschenberg greatly admired. Using found objects, photographs, and paint, the artist considered himself "a collaborator with objects." In this way, he sought to avoid excessive autobiographical readings and instead refers to the dynamics of the urban landscape.

Robert Rauschenberg, Trophy II (for Teeny and Marcel Duchamp) (1960)

Walker Art Center

Artwork of the Month: Robert Rauschenberg's Trophy II (for Teeny and Marcel Duchamp)